Palace Family Steak House

An Evening Of Music with Palace Family Steak House

2009-07-04T15:30:00.001-07:00

Tuesday, 14-Jul-2009
An Evening Of Music

with:
Palace Family Steak House
The Tender Few

Location:
The Rockit Room
406 Clement St.
San Francisco, CA

Joy Of Cooking Update: Cheese Spreads

2009-07-03T23:27:00.000-07:00

After a Joy Of Cooking hiatus, I did a sprint through Roquefort Cheese Balls (made for a birthday celebration at work), Liptauer Cheese Spread (ditto), Blue Cheese Spread With Walnuts (made for another birthday celebration), and Chutney Cheese Spread (ditto).

Joy Of Cooking Update: Situation Normal In Cheese Ball City

2009-05-27T08:27:00.000-07:00

I didn't bother blogging about making the Taramasalata because I completely ruined it. I accidentally added many times the rice potatoes called for in the recipe. This was a bit of a shame because there was somewhat of an adventure trying to locate taram. (We ended up getting it at Indus in Berkeley.) Rather than try to make it again, I moved on.

The Cream Cheese Ball (pictured, photo by Humuhumu) fared only slightly better. I made it and tasted one bite, but didn't feel much like eating it after that. Neither did Humu. It ended up in the trash after a few days in the refrigerator.

These two events may be a sign of Joy of Cooking Project burn-out. However, an opportunity to get a recipe out of the way by bringing the result to a special event or party should never be passed up! That brings us to the Cheddar Cheese Ball.

My coworker Kirk does the AIDS Ride every year. This year, we're having a small party at work where people can donate money to the cause or otherwise offer support. I've made a donation and I've made a cheddar cheese ball.

Please consider making a donation at Kirk's AIDS/Lifecycle home page.

Fog City

2009-05-11T22:13:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago, the Fog City Wrestling Twitter feed offered up a free t-shirt to whomever came up with the best answer to the question, "What's it like to be down with Fog City?"

Here was my answer.

Disclaimers: I recorded it quickly to get it posted in a timely fashion, so it's rough. I didn't have a guitar handy, so all the "guitar" parts are actually played on a bass guitar. I messed up and recorded some stuff stereo that should have been recorded mono, so as a result, there's no "guitar" in the right channel. Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

Check out some of our past jingles.

Sunday, April 26, Hemlock Tavern, San Francisco

2009-04-20T22:51:00.000-07:00

We have an upcoming show!

Sunday, April 26, Hemlock Tavern, San Francisco.

Warren Jackson Hearne @ 9pm.
Palace Family Steak House @ 10pm
The Slow Poisoner @ 11pm

And we have an upcoming 3-song EP! (Awesome Trilogy, Part 3)

Will we have the EP in time for the show? Who knows. But we have amazing artwork!

You can hear the whole EP in the Music Player on our Facebook page.

Drawing of a giant sloth playing a purple guitar being attacked by a saber-toothed cat wearing a viking helmet and rocking out by Humuhumu

A Giant Sloth Playing A Purple Guitar And Being Attacked By A Saber-Toothed Cat Wearing A Viking Helmet .And Rocking Out

2009-03-29T22:33:00.001-07:00

We have an upcoming show! (Sunday, April 26, Hemlock Tavern, San Francisco)

And we have an upcoming 3-song EP! (Awesome Trilogy, Part 3)

Will we have the EP in time for the show? Who knows. But we have amazing artwork!

You can hear the whole EP in the Music Player on our Facebook page.

Drawing of a giant sloth playing a purple guitar being attacked by a saber-toothed cat wearing a viking helmet and rocking out by Humuhumu

Joy Of Cooking Update: Out Of The Dips And Into The Spreads

2009-03-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

Baba ghanoush resulted in many recitations of material from The State.

With that and eggplant caviar under our belts (pun only marginally intended), we are officially out of the dips and into the spreads. Tapenade is next.

Quantifying Greatness In Music

2009-03-14T16:33:00.000-07:00

I just stumbled across this old thing I started writing. I have no intention of finishing it. In fact, I'm not even sure where I was going with it. This almost certainly had to be from the early days of the Palace Family Steak House web site when the concept was to make it as simultaneously tedious and yet paradoxically enjoyable a blog as possible.

It seems a shame to not put it out there. So, here you go. Sorry. (Anything that compares Eminem to Schoenberg requires an apology. So, I'm apologizing for that specifically, but also the whole thing in general.)

Quantifying Greatness In Music

There are essentially two schools of thought regarding quantifying
greatness algorithmically in art in general and in music specifically.
One school says, essentially, that it can't be done. The other school
says, essentially, that it can be done but we do not yet have the
machinery (i.e., computers) capable of doing so and/or the proper
algorithms.

I myself, for no good reason, subscribe to a sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty
Principle of quantifying greatness--as soon as you discover the algorithm,
greatness changes. Let's arrogantly decide that this is a third school.

The first school has a few different flavors and anyone subscribing to
it may be of any and all of the flavors. First, there is the idea
that greatness is too dependent on things that allegedly can't be
quantified, such as the cultural context of the work in question.
Then there is the idea that the perception of a work of art is simply
too complex and non-algorithmic to ever be modeled algorithmically.
Another idea is that greatness itself is a chimera; what is great to
one person is not great to another and trying to model the
determination of greatness is futile because you aren't trying to
model anything that is empirically real.

For people of the second school, perhaps the most immediate of these
objections is the one involving things that can't be quantified, such
as cultural context. Applying the Uncertainty Principle makes it all
the more problematic. If Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, as inarguable a
great work in music as you are going to find, were written today, it
would (correctly, in my opinion) not be celebrated as a great work.
Instead, it would be written off by critics as a conservative look
backward, and ignored by the public, or at best, embraced by a weak
and unimportant shard of the public the way John Williams's movie
scores are embraced. An algorithmic model of greatness based on
Beethoven's Ninth would fail miserably today, and correctly. The work
of Eminem contains complexities and challenges that Beethoven simply
could not have predicted. This is not to say that Eminem's work is
greater than Beethoven's. However, it may be as challenging and
important as Pierrot Lunaire. (I don't actually believe it to be
so, but I am not certain of my conviction here, which is another
problem for modeling greatness computationally.) Indeed, both The
Marhall Mathers LP and Schoenberg's Pierrot contain violent imagery
that was shocking upon its release to the world. The world debated
whether it was poetry or pandering. The world also debated (and
continues to debate) whether the vocal parts of Marshall Mathers and
Pierrot constitute music or charlatanism.

Sitting Around The Apartment All Day In Our Meat Suits

2009-03-08T22:42:00.001-07:00

We are playing a free show on April 26 at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco! We go on before the Slow Poisoner and after Warren Jackson Hearne!

There's a new song, "We Can't Be Stopped", over at our MySpace page.

And, since no one uses MySpace anymore, you should totally become a fan on Facebook.

This morning, Humuhumu and I got to talk to my nephews in Pennsylvania over Skype video chat. I believe it was their first time using video chat. To make it special, Humuhumu put on the bacon suit and I put on the steak suit before we answered the call. We both acted like this is what we do on a typical weekend day--sit around the apartment in our meat costumes.

Joy of Cooking recipes that have been made since the last Joy of Cooking update:
baked artichoke dip, seven-layer dip, hummus and a hummus variant called Half Moon hummus (pictured, photo by Humuhumu).

LA Times, Joy Of Cooking, and Calories

2009-02-17T06:13:00.000-08:00

The Los Angeles Times has published an article reporting on a study that suggests that calories in the recipes in The Joy of Cooking have ballooned over the years. I think that the chart that accompanies the article presents a more interesting picture than the article.

Putting aside the objection that the sample size of recipes is rather small—the study compared less than 20 of the cookbook's more than 4000 recipes—one can see that the calories have not increased slowly and steadily since 1936. Instead, they increase slowly and steadily from 1936 to 1963. But the 1975 and 1997 editions both have lower calorie counts than the 1963 edition.

Lastly, all six editions sampled prior to the current 2006 edition have the mean calories at less than 300. It is only the current edition that has a whopping 384 calories mean.

As for the text of the article, the most interesting parts to me are the observation that the size of dinner plates have increased (making portions that used to look ordinary appear small) and the awesome rebuttal by the editor of the 2006 edition.

(Via Brian Kahrs)

Joy Of Cooking Update: Beer And Cheese Dip (and other dips)

2009-02-16T15:35:00.000-08:00

I brought the ingredients and utensils necessary to make the beer cheese dip in a bread bowl to work. Jesse, the author of the awesome Beer & Nosh blog, works in the same building. With no advance notice, I asked him to come to the small kitchen in our building where he helped make the dip and took these photos with his iPhone.

The bread is from Boulange and the beer is Anchor Steam. Jesse felt that I could have selected a darker beer such as Guinness. He also felt strongly that the recipe should have called for making a roux in the saucepan at the outset, rather than adding whisked cornstarch and water to an already simmering saucepan of beer. On the other hand, he also expressed a somewhat perverse admiration for my slavish adherence to the letter of the recipe regardless of whether a bit of improvisation would improve it.

The next day, I made hot chorizo and cheese dip at home. I decided not to buy the chorizo with pork salivary glands, lymph nodes, and fat listed as the first three ingredients. Instead, I bought Molinari chorizo from Andronico's. For all I know, it has the same ingredients; I don't know because I got it from their butcher counter and no ingredients were listed on the generic wrapping the butcher put it in for me.

Yesterday, I made the hot crab dip. Humu and Echo tried it and reported that it was not bad, but not extraordinary either.

I am leaning so heavily on the opinions of others because I am discovering that I am not crazy about any dips whatsoever.

Five

2009-02-14T09:38:00.000-08:00

I don't normally replicate my posts at the Music Routes blog here. This post is an exception.

First, watch Sesame Street's Lovers Of Five sing about their favorite number:

The Sesame Street video is a genius parody/homage—let's call it a pomage—to the Floaters 1977 hit "Float On". In the likely event that you are unfamiliar with the Floaters's television performance of the song, here it is:

Don't miss some of the amazing lyrics, especially this variation that starts at the 3:11 mark:

Take my hand!

Let me take you to Loveland!

Let me show you how sweet it could be,

Sharing your love with Larry!

You go, Larry!

Bearing in mind that they didn't have YouTube and VHS tapes in those days, it's pretty amazing how closely Sesame Street was able to emulate (or at least capture the spirit of) the Floaters television performance.

The Sesame Street "Give Me Five" song was a notable presence in my life a few months ago. I would play it on various instruments. (The chords for both the Floaters song and the Sesame Street pomage are Gmaj7 and Dmaj7 repeated over and over, if you care to know.) I would absent-mindedly sing lines from the song throughout the day.

At first, my girlfriend was amused by this. She loved "Give Me Five"! How could you not? But after many weeks of incessant "GIve Me Five" in our apartment, she looked me in the eyes to let me know it was time for a heart-to-heart discussion. She said earnestly, "Honey, I love you, and I love the number five. And for that to continue, this must stop."

She wasn't kidding.

I decided that I would go cold turkey. I would neither play nor sing "Give Me Five" for five days. I slipped up a few times, absent-mindedly singing, "Give me 1, 2, 3, 4, but if you love me more," and had to reset the timer. But eventually I made it five days without any "Give Me Five" in my life.

It may have been the most difficult thing I've ever done.

Obligatory route: The Floaters to Sesame Street.

Upcoming Show! Old Recipes! New Baby!

2009-02-11T19:47:00.000-08:00

I should probably mention that the Palace Family Steak House band will be playing a show on Sunday, April 26, 2009, at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco. I know it's 2.5 months away, but Sunday's are rough, so put it in your calendar now. Do it!

I should also update on a few Joy of Cooking recipes from the past week or so.

Guacamole: Delicious! Especially beloved by Lisa, the 9-months pregnant wife of "Hot Licks" Brad who were over for dinner!

White Bean Dip with Rosemary and Garlic: Bland. Bummer. If I were to make it again, I'd reduce the amount of beans and up the white pepper.

Texas Caviar: Basically, a black-eyed peas salsa-like salad, or salad-like salsa. It was great, although the recipe makes 8 cups, which is an awful lot.

Spinach Dip in a Bread Bowl: Awesome, although I might have overdone it with the garlic. I brought this into work and left it in the copy room where it was promptly destroyed by hungry coworkers. It was awesome to see an empty wreck of a bread bowl at the end of the day.

Lastly, and most importantly, the aforementioned "Hot Licks" Brad and Lisa are no longer pregnant! They are the proud parents of a healthy baby girl! That's three PFSH band babies in the last 6 or 8 months. Wow! Congratulations, Brad and Lisa!

Joy of Cooking Update: Sour Cream-Based Dips

2009-01-28T19:55:00.000-08:00

Anyone who knows me knows that I generally dislike white creamy foods. Mayonnaise in particular makes me want to lose my lunch.

One of the motivations for going through The Joy of Cooking recipe-by-recipe in order is to learn to appreciate foods I might not normally try to appreciate. By spending a week making and eating sour cream dips, surely I could come to love—or at least not despise—sour cream dips.

Well, I certainly learned to not despise them. But I don't love them. The ones that had no mayonnaise were easier to take than the ones that did.

The clam dip seemed to go over well at a work function even though I skimped on the clams.

The shrimp dip calls for chili sauce. The previous edition of The Joy of Cooking had a recipe for chili sauce that was basically ketchup with some extra stuff. It wasn't spicy. I figured they couldn't mean that. So I went to the other extreme and used Sriracha. I figured the shrimp dip recipe looked so bad that overwhelming it with spice could only make it more palatable. I'm still not sure if I was correct. I posted to Twitter and Facebook and had my friend Leslie take the shrimp dip off my hands. She has eaten two bites or so thus far. I anticipate the rest of it will end up in the compost bin.

The red onion dip and the Becker sour cream dip have been my favorites. This is because of what they do not have (mayonnaise, shellfish) more than anything that they do have.

Joy of Cooking Update: Spanish-Style Marinated Olives

2009-01-28T19:51:00.001-08:00

The recipe for Spanish-style marinated olives called for refrigerating the the marinating olives for at least two days.

However, refrigerating them meant that the olive oil congealed. I'm not sure that really constitutes marinating anymore.

I would tell you if they were amazing or awful, but I don't really know good olives from bad olives. Olives is olives to me.

Joy Of Cooking Update: Popcorn

2009-01-24T14:56:00.001-08:00

Word to the wise: When The Joy of Cooking instructs you to use a 3-quart pot for popping popcorn, do not use a 2-quart pot.

I got to try different pots, as there are 6 different savory additions to popcorn. The most fun pot to use is definitely one with a glass lid so you can watch the hot popping action. All the savory additions were good, but my favorites were grated Parmesan, finely chopped rosemary, and garlic powder. I will have to try those three in various combinations.

The popcorn recipe is on page 71. It was somewhat unsettling to read, "For sweet popcorn additions, see [page] 865." If I cooked the recipes at the rate of one page a day—and there are roughly 6 recipes on each page—I still would not be done in two years. If I go at the more reasonable but still ambitious rate of one recipe a day, we're talking about twelve years.

And that assumes that when I get up to the bear meat recipe, I don't have any problems obtaining bear meat.

Copycat Crime

2009-01-20T23:07:00.000-08:00

First, watch this video:

Then, read this news article:

Authorities say a St. Petersburg woman was charged with battery after hitting a man in the head with a bagel.

The PFSH band apologizes for causing this unfortunate copycat crime.

(Thanks to JP for the news article tip!)

Joy Of Cooking Update: Chestnuts That Are Not Poisonous

2009-01-20T21:39:00.000-08:00

My first selection of chestnuts for roasting turned out—and, as Dave Barry would say, I swear I'm not making this up—to be poisonous. (See the last few paragraphs of the previous post for details.) My second attempt at roasted chestnuts turned out much better. After more than one failed attempt to find chestnuts to purchase, I finally found them at Falletti's near the Golden Gate Park panhandle.

This time around, instead of being bitter like the poison horse chestnuts, the roasted chestnuts were surprisingly sweet. To me, they tasted a bit like sugar-sweetened tuna, although obviously the texture was unlike that of tuna.

The same day, I made toasted squash seeds and toasted sunflower seeds. When I've made these things in the past, just winging it rather than following a recipe in The Joy of Cooking, I would toast them for a short while. This time around, they toasted for an hour or more. And the squash seeds were simmered in water for two hours first. This seemed like a lot of preparation for some simple snacks. But I have to say it all paid off. They were delicious and much nuttier with this slower, longer toasting treatment.

Joy Of Cooking Update: Crispy Spicy Pecans

2009-01-18T19:07:00.000-08:00

The crispy spicy pecans were fantastic. They may not have been as crispy as they were supposed to be—I had lined the baking sheet with a silicone mat. Still, they were crispy enough and possessed an addictive flavor not unlike Chex Mix. (That's supposed to be a compliment.)

We brought the pecans to a party, where everyone seemed to like them barring the folks with nut allergies.

For the party, Humu made raspberry financiers from the Boulange cookbook. They too were fantastic, and a big hit at the party (barring, of course, the folks with nut allergies, as the financiers contained ground hazelnuts).

The food item that caused the most buzz at the party—barring those with nut allergies—was provided by another guest. It was a baked brie + bread + pecans + maple syrup dish that was described by one taster as "brie pancakes". It's hard to compete with brie pancakes. Bravo, Tiki Kaimuki!

I personally refused to stop eating some ridiculously tasty turkey meatballs in some sort of magic awesome sauce. Bravo, Myke and Jay!

The host produced delicious classic mai tais and other tiki cocktails. Bravo, Ron!

I tried to get a jump on the next Joy of Cooking recipe: roasted chestnuts. Chestnuts are getting hard to find, and I thought I was lucky to locate some horse chestnuts at a local grocery co-op.

After I roasted them, Humu and I sampled them. They were unpleasantly and persistently bitter. We didn't eat more than a nibble or two.

Humu googled for bitter roasted chestnuts to find out if we had chestnuts that had gone bad. What she found out instead was that horse chestnuts are poisonous. Oops. I must have gotten them out of the potpourri section of the co-op.

Fortunately, we did not die, go to the hospital, or vomit.

Joy Of Cooking Update: The Final Punch

2009-01-11T15:25:00.001-08:00

The last punch in The Joy of Cooking was mulled cider. We had a party to celebrate the end of the punches. The mulled cider was a hit, in all its perfume-like glory.

The end of the punches also meant the beginning of the appetizers. There are three roasted mix nut recipes that start the appetizers section and we had all three: roasted nuts, curried nuts, and rosemary and brown sugar nuts. Amidst the excitement about the other food items and the punch, they did not garner much comment one way or the other.

Humuhumu made some ahi poke that everyone loved. Our friend Echo brought a fantastic fruit+cheese+chocolate pie dessert that she made. We bought some other food items. Many other friends came over and brought yet more food and one dog.

I used this opportunity to make Warren Zevon's chili. Zevon's recipe is reproduced in I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon. The reproduction is of a typewritten page with a few hand-written notes. Favorite recipe instruction: "Put in plenty of cumin and keep putting it in. Believe it." I don't eat chili much, but I really enjoyed this recipe and will probably make it again.

Photos of cider and chili by Humuhumu
Photo of nuts by Misty White

U2's Upcoming Musical

2009-01-08T19:49:00.000-08:00

Apparently there are people that think that U2 + a Spiderman musical = a good idea.

As long as they aren't stealing my thunder with a steak musical, I'm cool with it.

New Year, New Strategy

2009-01-07T19:26:00.000-08:00

Wow, it's been almost three years since we released Original Cast Soundtrack Recording! Since that time, some of the recordings have been retooled. Initially, I thought I wanted something gloriously raw and ragged, so I was OK with tracks that had no bass and no guitar. Piano, drums, and vocals—I wouldn't always call it singing.

But then the band formed and started playing live and the performances started sounding better than the recordings. That had to be addressed. So, over on our MySpace page, the versions of "Palace Family Steak House" and "Set The Place On Fire" have guitar and bass overdubs. And now I almost can't stand to listen to the old versions of those songs without Brad and Anu's guitar and bass.

But other than that, almost no new material in 2008! I thought I did this Willotoons jingle in 2008, but that was actually 2007! This other Willotoons jingle was recorded in 2008, but only barely. There's a ragged acoustic "Frank Loves The 'F' Word" we recorded and made available on our MySpace page. But that's it.

What?! That's crazy!

New strategy: I'm going to record singles. Or, really, EPs. Four or five songs at a time. Get some new material out this year.

Joy Of Cooking Update: Wassail

2008-12-25T22:25:00.000-08:00

Humu and I put out the APB on Facebook and Twitter to try to get some people to come over last-minute to drink some wassail on a Sunday night. This was not nearly as successful as our last-minute effort to get people to come over to drink mulled wine.

The next day, everyone asked me how the wassail was. It quickly became clear that they all thought it was somewhat like a mulled beer. It appears that everyone read Wikipedia to find out what wassail was, and then decided they weren't interested in mulled beer. (Wikipedia does mention that modern versions tend to be closer to cider than beer, but the emphasis does seem to be on something ale-like.)

The wassail recipe in The Joy of Cooking is more like a cross between mulled cream sherry, egg nog, and baked apples. It is only the third of the many punches in The Joy of Cooking that I am likely to make again. (The other two were the first egg nog and glögg.) It was very tasty and it's too bad others weren't around to enjoy it. Because it contained uncooked eggs, I did not feel comfortable saving the leftovers for a later date. A large amount of wassail was sadly discarded.

Photo by Humuhumu

Joy Of Cooking Update: Mulled Wine

2008-12-13T08:59:00.000-08:00

Last Saturday, we made a big batch of Mulled Wine and put the word out on Facebook and Twitter that people should come and drink it. Prior to Web 2.0, I don't know how we would have ever found enough people at the absolutely last minute on a Saturday night to spend a few hours to drink cheap wine infused with spices. The future looks tremendous.

On Wednesday, we went to a potluck dinner party with some friends from SF Indie. We brought all the ingredients for the Mulled Wine, set them on fire, and voila, we had Vin Brûlé. You can sort of see the spectacle in the photo, although you miss the part where I singed hairs on my hand and arm.

But enough of these hit-and-(mostly)-miss Joy of Cooking cocktails! PFSH guitarist Brad Neighbors and his wife Lisa are expecting a child. Humuhumu and I were asked to devise a cocktail menu. So we spent a couple weeks creating four cocktails and served them at the baby shower last night (Friday). We were very pleased with the results. You can read all about it in her Facebook note!

Photo by Humuhumu

Joy Of Cooking Update: Glögg

2008-12-04T19:37:00.000-08:00

Visiting my sister, Swedish brother-in-law, and half-Swedish nephews for Thanksgiving meant that it was very fitting to make glögg. Even with the cheapest port I could find, this was a treat. Over the course of the entire evening, four adults finished what The Joy of Cooking says was 20 servings. (Actually, the pot that I used to simmer the glögg resulted in something closer to 12 servings.)

Humu and I concurred that this and the eggnog recipe are the best ones so far in the alcoholic punches section.

Photo by Humuhumu